The Game Awards
| The Game Awards | |
|---|---|
 The Game Awards 2016
|
|
 |
|
| Awarded for | Outstanding achievements in the video game industry |
| Country | United States |
| First awarded | December 5, 2014 |
| Official website | thegameawards |
The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony honoring achievements in the video game industry. The ceremonies also feature the premieres of new titles and an in-depth look at previously announced games. The shows are solely produced and hosted by Geoff Keighley, who had worked on its predecessor, the Spike Video Game Awards, for over ten years.
From 2003 to 2013, Spike TV promoted and televised the Spike Video Game Awards (abbreviated VGA) near the end of each calendar year to honor video games releases during that year. Geoff Keighley served as the producer and often host for these shows. In 2013, Spike opted to rename the awards from VGA to VGX as to reflect that they wanted to focus more on next-generation games that were being ushered in by the onset of the eighth generation of consoles, as well as bringing comedian Joel McHale to co-host alongside Keighley. The 2013 show was considered to be disappointing and aimed as a more commercial work rather than a celebration of video game achievements.
Keighley opted to drop out from further involvement in the VGX, allowing Spike to retain ownership of the property; in November 2014, Spike TV announced that they had opted to drop the awards show in its entirety. Instead, Keighley worked with several entities within the industry, including console hardware manufacturers Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and several large publishers, to financially back and craft a new awards show, the Game Awards, with Spike's blessing. Keighley was able to secure space for hosting the live event. Without a broadcaster, Keighley and the entities agreed to stream the live show on the consoles' networks and on Valve Corporation's Steam service, as to be able to reach a much larger audience than Spike TV previously had.
The Game Awards has an advisory committee which includes representatives from hardware manufactures Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and AMD, and software publishers Electronic Arts, Activision, Rockstar Games, Telltale Games, Ubisoft, Valve, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. This committee selects around thirty influential video game news organizations that will be able to nominate and subsequently vote on the video games in several categories. The advisory committee otherwise does not participate in the nomination or voting process. During the nomination round, each of the news outlets provides a list of games in several categories; games for the eSports-related categories are chosen by a specific subset of these outlets. The committee complies the nominations and selects the most-nominated titles for voting by these same outlets.
...
Wikipedia